1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to provisioning network routes and, more particularly, relates to interactively provisioning network routes.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a communication network having a plurality of interconnected nodes, there may be multiple routes that data can traverse from a source node to a drop node (i.e., a node where the data will be used). There may be a direct link between the source node and the drop node, and/or there may be a plurality of routes from the source node to the drop node via one or more intermediate nodes. Particular routes between a source node and each drop node are provisioned (i.e., established) so that network equipment know how to route data to a particular drop node. The information regarding provisioned routes can be stored in a routing table that a node uses to determine the appropriate route to send or forward data (the routing table can be stored in a computer program memory, for example), or the network can be engineered to ensure that data flows in a certain way (i.e., network equipment can be wired or cabled to constrain the flow of data in a specific direction).
Various techniques are known for automatically provisioning network routes to optimize transmission characteristics. For example, techniques are known that determine the shortest distance between nodes, the fewest number of links to be traversed between nodes, and the minimum cost route (where a weighted value or “cost” is assigned to each network link). However, these techniques do not work well when the number of possible routes becomes large, or special conditions exist that are not characterized by a weight or cost. The number of routes may be large due to the network type, e.g., a mesh network in which nodes may be linked to multiple other nodes, or due to the type of data traffic for which routes are being provisioned, e.g., broadcast traffic where routes must be provisioned from a source node to each of multiple drop nodes. Further, in the case of broadcast data, a secondary (i.e., backup) source node is often used, and routes must be provisioned from the secondary source node to each drop node, preferably using diverse routing (i.e., routes that differ from the routes used from the primary source node).
One approach to achieve diverse routing in a mesh network has been to divide the mesh network into plural ring networks. In a ring network, each node is linked to just two other nodes, so traffic received on one link is always sent out on the other link, and vice versa. Diverse routing is achieved within each ring by routing the unidirectional traffic in opposite directions along the ring. However, this approach is not optimal for a mesh network, because some of the nodes might get the same traffic flow more than once, and therefore some of the links may be overutilized.